Why don't the whole planet just use UTC+00:00 / Universal Time without time zones?
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Why exactly is asking for "what time is the local noon" more convenient than asking "what timezone is this"?
How is "local noon is at 2:45" somehow easier to adjust to than "adjust your clock by X hours"? You don't need to relearn every thing like what time breakfast is served when local noon is 08:50.
It's not more convenient. I'm just saying we'd have been used to that and just as weirded out by the idea of time zones if that was all we'd ever known.
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Answer quickly, if noon is 0330 what time is dinner, what is a 9-5 job and what time do you expect to have breakfast. There are lots of adjustments you will need to make, whereas with the current system you know that as a general rule you can expect dinner at around 8, most people to work 9-5, and places to serve breakfast at 8 or 9, so you switch your clock when you arrive and you're done.
If you're a local who never moved timezones z then yeah it makes no difference what the numbers are, you would get used to waking up at 9PM and switching date midway through the day, there might even be 2 different words for tomorrow, one for the next day one for the next date, but the moment you traveled to a different location all of your years of being used to general time where things happen go out the window, it's much more of a hassle than adjusting your clock and assuming times will be mostly similar.
Yep. I can tell you that dinner would be around 0930, but you're right that the other calculations are tougher.
I'm not saying this would be better. Either system has trade-offs. I'm saying that each of them would be equally weird from the other side.
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So every time you deal with somebody in a different location, you can't assume anything about the hours and times you have to ask them or go look it up Even if you have a decent idea where they live because you're not going to know the time disparity of every city out there.
That's not too different from how it is now. In fact it might be worse, because once you know a time you have to remember not only a time but the offset that you know the time in.
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Your ring up a person, they go "why the fuck are you calling me at 09:45?", sounding really upset. You don't understand why. He's in a place where that means it's the middle of the night and as a local he understands it.
Oooor
He could just say "do you know what time it is here? It's two am!" and you'd understand.
No, in this hypothetical scenario, he wouldn't complain about it being 0945 because he's grown up in a world where that's ambiguous. He's going to say, "Don't you know it's the middle of the night here?!"
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Why isn't this a popular thing?
Because "the markets open at 9" is an international standard that everyone can count on. You could stagger it so that one country's market opens at 10, then another at 12, and so on, but then what if one country chooses a different standard? What if a restaurant picks a different convention than businesses in one area? Time zones are great because once you understand them, you'll always know how time works locally, anywhere in the world with a single piece of information, it's a truly successful standard.
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Who are you, a service employee? In our country, office workers' shifts are 7-15 and factory workers' 6-14, plus 14-22 and 22-6 in two/three-shift operations. The workday opening hours of small businesses are approximately:
- Convenience shops: 6-7 to 18-21 (overwhelmingly run by the Vietnamese minority)
- Pubs: 10-16 to 20-24
- Bakeries: 6 to 15-16
- Clothes stores, jewelry etc.: 8-10 to 16-18 (closest to a "9-5")
- Hairdressers, massage parlors: by appointment, usually 10-20
People who ever work after 16:00 are a minority.
To be fair, a lot of office jobs (in Prague at least) are 9-17, or 8-16. Unless you meant government offices, which do open earlier with standart 8(7.5)hr shift
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Long discussion here. I feel I'd like to add two things. First: we already do. If you coordinate international video calls or conference live streams, you'll say it starts 14:00 UTC. That is something we can do and regularly do. Some companies will use the timezone of their headquarters, though.
Furthermore: Once you're already in the process of changing how time works, don't do a half-assed job. Go all the way and make it metric. Do away with all the 12/24 and 60s. And make things divisible by 1000.
Base 10/100 is inferior to 12/60 when it comes to splitting.
10 can only be divided by 10,5,2, and 1. 100 only adds 4, 25, and 50 to that.
12 is divisible by 12,6,4,3,2, and 1. 60 adds 5,10,15,20, and 30.
What is time other than measuring the movements of circles and spheres? The rotation of the earth, the revolution around the sun. It makes sense for us to use the same basic 12/60/360 tools we use for circles, degrees. The “metric” measurement of circles is radians, which would require factoring pi into our measurement of time, and that would be way more complicated.
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Why isn't this a popular thing?
On the other hand, we could refine time zones so they’re continuous instead of discrete chunks. Then every step you take adjusts the time. Would be more “accurate.”
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Base 10/100 is inferior to 12/60 when it comes to splitting.
10 can only be divided by 10,5,2, and 1. 100 only adds 4, 25, and 50 to that.
12 is divisible by 12,6,4,3,2, and 1. 60 adds 5,10,15,20, and 30.
What is time other than measuring the movements of circles and spheres? The rotation of the earth, the revolution around the sun. It makes sense for us to use the same basic 12/60/360 tools we use for circles, degrees. The “metric” measurement of circles is radians, which would require factoring pi into our measurement of time, and that would be way more complicated.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]That is correct. We'd gain a few things though. For example I could easily tell how much time passed between 8:47am and 3:22pm without doing all the gymnastics. Or maybe how many days it is until a certain date. As of now that's just a lot of irregular 30s and 31s and then the last of February and you almost need a look-up table for that with all the extra rules and exceptions.
Main thing I wanted to say, once you decouple time from the timezones, you're somewhat on the way of making earth's spin meaningless. You'd end up going to work at 14:50 and returning home at 23:20 anyway (for example). Maybe you'll advance into a new day randomly while at it. I don't see how that's fundamentally different to just working from 250 until 600. And I think I can as easily remember to pick up the kids at 2am or at 100 ticks. Also some calculations wirh the 60 are really annoying. Netflix will show a movie is 145 minutes, it's now x o clock and do I get to bed at 10:30pm? That'd also be easier with metric.
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To be fair, a lot of office jobs (in Prague at least) are 9-17, or 8-16. Unless you meant government offices, which do open earlier with standart 8(7.5)hr shift
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No, in this hypothetical scenario, he wouldn't complain about it being 0945 because he's grown up in a world where that's ambiguous. He's going to say, "Don't you know it's the middle of the night here?!"
wrote on last edited by [email protected]because he's grown up in a world where that's ambiguous
No he hasn't. Never moved a or traveled outside his own city.
That why this "make everyones time the same" is about as smart as an idea as shoving Lego up your nose.
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It's not more convenient. I'm just saying we'd have been used to that and just as weirded out by the idea of time zones if that was all we'd ever known.
No we wouldn't.
One of these is a logical thing, we measured time in the relative passing of days.
Having "our local noon is 0550pm" is dumb as rocks and nowhere comparable to time zones. Unlike some people have prolly told you, not every idea is equal.
Now go ahead and read what it's doing in China and see our glorious idea at work
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No we wouldn't.
One of these is a logical thing, we measured time in the relative passing of days.
Having "our local noon is 0550pm" is dumb as rocks and nowhere comparable to time zones. Unlike some people have prolly told you, not every idea is equal.
Now go ahead and read what it's doing in China and see our glorious idea at work
Having "our local noon is 0550pm" is dumb as rocks and nowhere comparable to time zones.
How is "our local noon is at 1200" any more objectively logical? Midnight is an objectively arbitrary time to start the new date. The best you can say is that it's twelve hours before local noon, but even if you index off of local noon it doesn't make any more logical sense to put the 0 while most people are asleep. Someone who hasn't grown up with our clock might well say, "why would we choose a clock that puts the beginning of the usable part of the day at 6 or 7 for most people?" Calling the hour when people wake up 0000 or 0100 would make a lot of logical sense.
Unlike some people have prolly told you, not every idea is equal.
Numbers have no inherent meaning. We could make noon happen at 0000, 1200, 2200, whatever--and people would find it completely intuitive if they grew up in it all their lives.
I'm not saying that "every idea is equal." That's patently nonsense. What I'm saying is that, if you're going to have a 24-hour clock indexed to noon, putting noon at 1200 makes just as much sense as putting it at any other time on that 24-hour clock.
Now go ahead and read what it's doing in China and see our glorious idea at work
Sounds like the answer is "fine." People in Xinjiang wake up a couple of hours late, start work at 1100, have lunch at 1400, and often watch the sun set at midnight. They continue to live there and continue to have a pretty normal life. The only weirdness comes from talking to people in other time zones, which again would not be a problem if everyone in the world had started with this from their youth.
Again, I'm not trying to suggest that it's better. I'm just saying that this arbitrary choice about how to handle time around the world is not any better or worse than any other arbitrary choice we could have made; it's only because we know our current method so well that we think any other method is weird.
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because he's grown up in a world where that's ambiguous
No he hasn't. Never moved a or traveled outside his own city.
That why this "make everyones time the same" is about as smart as an idea as shoving Lego up your nose.
Are you suggesting that this is a world without the internet or international television programs? He's going to know that hours are different everywhere, especially if he has friends in other regions.
That why this "make everyones time the same" is about as smart as an idea as shoving Lego up your nose.
Only because the current way is the one you know. In this alternate universe where the whole world has always been on UTC and someone posted a question on Lemmy asking why the whole planet isn't divided up into 1-hour offsets with their own times, that universe's version of you would be just as irrationally angry with that universe's version of me for daring to suggest that the time zone idea is no less irrational than the UTC idea.
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That would be shifting from timezone to "workzone" or "noonzone". At this moment you need to setup a meeting with people, then you ask which is their timezone. With global UTC timezone, then you need to ask, which are your work hours? (workzone).
With global UTC timezone, then you need to ask, which are your work hours?
Which would be beautiful because you'd instantly gain an intuitive understanding of how that overlaps with your own work hours instead of having to do a conversion.
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Are you suggesting that this is a world without the internet or international television programs? He's going to know that hours are different everywhere, especially if he has friends in other regions.
That why this "make everyones time the same" is about as smart as an idea as shoving Lego up your nose.
Only because the current way is the one you know. In this alternate universe where the whole world has always been on UTC and someone posted a question on Lemmy asking why the whole planet isn't divided up into 1-hour offsets with their own times, that universe's version of you would be just as irrationally angry with that universe's version of me for daring to suggest that the time zone idea is no less irrational than the UTC idea.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I can't believe you're being serious. Literally, I have a hard time believing you aren't pretending to be that simple.
Only because the current way is the one you know. In this alternate universe where the whole world has always been on UTC
You don't understand time zones or geopolitical history either it seems, and you're imaging people from thousands of years ago to have a concept of universality. I can't thank you enough for the roaring belly laughs I've gotten from reading your brain farts.
You're not proposing a single improvement, you're making the system actively much much much shittier
planet isn't divided up into 1-hour offsets with their own times, that universe's version
Except it is, because that's how hours work. You probably don't know where they come from either
I know it seems to you like you're making sense, but you're not, because you're ignorant of so many assumptions you've made, which if changed, would be like giving ancient Romans the GPS instead of them using sundials and that said Romans would've magically been able to consider that theyre noon is two hours after "the real" noon, which is based on.........?
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Why isn't this a popular thing?
Why should the UK get to be the only place with an accurate local time? I don't want to live on UK time.
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Having "our local noon is 0550pm" is dumb as rocks and nowhere comparable to time zones.
How is "our local noon is at 1200" any more objectively logical? Midnight is an objectively arbitrary time to start the new date. The best you can say is that it's twelve hours before local noon, but even if you index off of local noon it doesn't make any more logical sense to put the 0 while most people are asleep. Someone who hasn't grown up with our clock might well say, "why would we choose a clock that puts the beginning of the usable part of the day at 6 or 7 for most people?" Calling the hour when people wake up 0000 or 0100 would make a lot of logical sense.
Unlike some people have prolly told you, not every idea is equal.
Numbers have no inherent meaning. We could make noon happen at 0000, 1200, 2200, whatever--and people would find it completely intuitive if they grew up in it all their lives.
I'm not saying that "every idea is equal." That's patently nonsense. What I'm saying is that, if you're going to have a 24-hour clock indexed to noon, putting noon at 1200 makes just as much sense as putting it at any other time on that 24-hour clock.
Now go ahead and read what it's doing in China and see our glorious idea at work
Sounds like the answer is "fine." People in Xinjiang wake up a couple of hours late, start work at 1100, have lunch at 1400, and often watch the sun set at midnight. They continue to live there and continue to have a pretty normal life. The only weirdness comes from talking to people in other time zones, which again would not be a problem if everyone in the world had started with this from their youth.
Again, I'm not trying to suggest that it's better. I'm just saying that this arbitrary choice about how to handle time around the world is not any better or worse than any other arbitrary choice we could have made; it's only because we know our current method so well that we think any other method is weird.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]You don't know what "arbitrary" means..
Noon or midnight aren't arbitrary. They're the exact opposite. Noon is the middle of the day. The exact middle point of one revolution of our planet (roughly, days aren't actually exactly a day long but that's too advanced for you lol).
The exact middle of the day, recognisable to most people simply by looking up, is the exact opposite of arbitrary.
Numbers have no inherent meaning
Uh, yes they do. That's why they're called numbers. "2" means || that many things and "5" means ||||| means that many things. There's literally an inherent meaning in them.
There's also actual reason as to why the day is divided the way it is, but seeing how proud you are of your overbearing ignorance, I'm not gonna educate you on what it is.
Hours weren't always the same length, it'd depend on the length of the time of day. Do you know what doesn't change? Noon being in the middle of the day. Because we're on a revolving piece of rock in space and no matter how much you stomp your foot and cry foul, noon will still always be non-arbitrary
What you need is a fkin dictionary bruh
Sounds like the answer is "fine."
Ah, some deeply meaningful willfull ignorance, because you can't admit you backed a moronic idea.
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Why isn't this a popular thing?
wrote on last edited by [email protected]because we sleep at night and are active during the day, and so we need to track that in a way that is universal. if i mention 12:00, people understand that it is noon where i am, and if i mention 22:00, they know it's bedtime.
the whole point of time zones is to have time cohesion in a wider region within margin of error of solar noon, so people on the far east and far west of a time zone are close enough to solar noon at 12:00. you can take a train to a neighbouring city without having to worry about needing to adjust your timekeeping devices by a few minutes.
to put your scenario into perspective, china has already done what you suggested on a smaller scale: the entire country is on UTC+8 for the sake of "unity" and "national cohesion". beijing loves it; 12:00 is still noon there! except it ain't in xinjiang and tibet. xinjiang has its own unofficial xinjiang time zone of UTC+6, and so people have to specify which time zone they're talking about and convert times between the two time zones in conversation because the uyghers use xinjiang time and the han chinese use beijing time, and you can imagine the confusion and also technical issues that has arisen from that.
imagine that, but 12 times worse. no thanks, i'll do the simple math of converting time zones if i ever need to communicate internationally.
fuck daylight savings. take that shit out back.
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I can't believe you're being serious. Literally, I have a hard time believing you aren't pretending to be that simple.
Only because the current way is the one you know. In this alternate universe where the whole world has always been on UTC
You don't understand time zones or geopolitical history either it seems, and you're imaging people from thousands of years ago to have a concept of universality. I can't thank you enough for the roaring belly laughs I've gotten from reading your brain farts.
You're not proposing a single improvement, you're making the system actively much much much shittier
planet isn't divided up into 1-hour offsets with their own times, that universe's version
Except it is, because that's how hours work. You probably don't know where they come from either
I know it seems to you like you're making sense, but you're not, because you're ignorant of so many assumptions you've made, which if changed, would be like giving ancient Romans the GPS instead of them using sundials and that said Romans would've magically been able to consider that theyre noon is two hours after "the real" noon, which is based on.........?
You're assuming an awful lot about me based on complete ignorance and using those assumptions to justify a really bizarre level of abuse.
You don't understand time zones or geopolitical history either it seems, and you're imaging people from thousands of years ago to have a concept of universality.
I'm not. That's literally the premise of the idea proposed here. The fact that you don't get that is really making me question your reading comprehension abilities.
You're not proposing a single improvement,
Correct. I'm not. As I've noted several times now, I'm not proposing anything. I'm just pointing out that we have a significant bias toward the system we already know.
Except it is, because that's how hours work. You probably don't know where they come from either
Yeah, they were chosen more or less arbitrarily by the ancient Egyptians because there were twelve significant constellations they followed, which led to a sort of base-12 number system they used for stuff related to the sky (months and hours in particular).
Again, units and numbers have no inherent meaning. We made it all up. A day could just as easily have had ten hours of 144 minutes each, or 40 hours of 36 minutes each.
I know it seems to you like you're making sense, but you're not...
The fact that you don't understand what I'm saying doesn't mean that I'm not making sense. And I think there's ample evidence here that you're just not reading carefully.
...because you're ignorant of so many assumptions you've made, which if changed, would be like giving ancient Romans the GPS instead of them using sundials and that said Romans would've magically been able to consider that theyre noon is two hours after "the real" noon, which is based on.........?
Ok. Deciphering your word salad here, I think you're trying to suggest that our current 24-hour day and time zones were somehow inevitable? Which...I mean, obviously they aren't, since there are many cultures that independently came up with different time systems.
There's a Hindi clock that divides the day into thirty hours. Roman timekeeping was divided into 12 hours, but that time was measured from sunrise to sunset. Byzantine time uses the same division of days into 24 hours, but starts a day at sunset, meaning that the start of a day changes within the same city throughout the year. France even tried decimal time for a while, where each day has ten hours, each hour has 100 minutes, and each minute has 100 seconds. All of these systems arose from different starting conditions, none of which were "giving Romans GPS" (they already knew the Earth was round) and none of which caused any problems with users going to sleep at different times of day.
The thought experiment here isn't "how could this have happened given existing conditions?" or even "what conditions could have brought this about?" but rather "assuming a world where some set of conditions brought about a true worldwide UTC without offsets, what would it look like to the users of that system?"
And this is what you've decided merits abusive behavior. Can't imagine what you're like about stuff that actually matters.
